Crepe Cake: Aka the Leaning Tower of Crepes

Baking is often associated with love. Fresh baked cookies for your elementary school bake sale. The fruitcake your dear aunt bakes every Christmas that everyone says is lovely but secretly leaves to decay. Ok, so the latter example is probably a stereotype taken from far too many American sitcoms. In this case, this biscoff cream cheese crepe cake is more of a labor of love rather than baked with love (or er, assembled with love). Though the French would probably gaze down unsympathetically at my pleading and begging for my crepe cake to not turn Italian. Well, as Italian as the Leaning Tower of Pisa at least.

Its hard not to be immediately enamored by the sight of a crepe cake. After all, it consists of delicate, thin crepes stacked till they become something stronger and greater together. Kinda like the Avengers, but in cake form. The entire cake took two days to make, one evening of crepe making, another afternoon of crepe stacking. To be honest, my crepes probably weren't the paper thin, lacy delicacies that people like the Domestic Goddess aka Nigella Lawson think of when you say crepes. However if you wanted a semi-decent crepe that is still thin enough to be not-a-pancake, then call me up! The most difficult part of the crepe making process was getting the pan tilting and whirling just right so you got an evenly thick crepe without random pockets of nothing. I don't think I've got it down quite yet, but my imperfections just give me more excuses to make crepes right?

I call my cake the leaning tower of crepes not because of the occasionally mismatched crepe sizes, but because of the next component--the glue to the cake. The filling in the ultra-traditional crepe cake is pastry creme, but judging by the sheer number of hits on foodgawker and google, people have taken great liberties with this filling. Heck, Sprinkle Bakes even covered the whole cake with a healthy layer of ganache to make quite possibly the most beautiful cake in the history of the internet. I've been dying to make something with remaining part of the jar of biscoff/speculoos I towed back with me from Belgium, so when I saw a biscoff crepe cake, my heart was set. But I'm not about that buttercream life so I opted for cream cheese biscoff frosting.

Alas, my 3 month hiatus from baking led to one small problem--the notoriously slippery nature of cream cheese frosting. As I stacked the cake with layers of frosting in between each crepe (28 total!), the frosting began to melt quite a bit. Towards the 20th layer, things started sliding around quite a bit. The cake made several trips to the freezer to firm up. Overall, it was a very stressful labor of love. But one I would totally repeat in a heartbeat should the occasion for a crepe cake ever arise again. Except, maybe not with cream cheese.



Another thing I forgot was the speculoos is already intensely sweet, so to make a cream cheese frosting with speculoos thickened with cups of powdered sugar equals a very very sweet filling. But sweetness seems to relative from my experience with a very picky mother (shockingly, she liked the cake a lot despite its sweetness). And anyways, just look at those layers. stare long and hard at them. How could you resist baking such a beautiful creation?
(also, whipping cream melts rapidly in a warm kitchen when you're trying to take pictures of a cake while adjusting the camera settings)

TL;DR Baking Notes:

• Crepes can be stored in a ziplock bag with parchment paper in between crepes in the fridge for a few days in the fridge, or even longer frozen.
• A firm, non-melty frosting is probably ideal if you're gonna make a crepe cake that doesn't tilt everywhere.
• Biscoff frostings are really sweet.

Crepe recipe and presentation inspiration from Olga's Flavor Factory. Biscoff cream cheese frosting from Center Cut Cook.

Tres Leches Cake: Shoutout to Yale Dining

If you happen to be an ~alumni~ colleague reading this, then you're probably mildly tired of all the post-commencement photo dumps and sentimental posts. Well, at least I am. Commencement is certainly an exciting time, but after a week of senior activities PLUS 3 days worth of ceremonies and events, it gets pretty exhausting.

For my first post in post-college life, I decided to keep up with the sentimental spirit floating around social media and make tres leches, a Yale dining classic. We students do love to complain about college dining, but every once in a while, there's a few things they get right. One of which includes tres leches, a sponge cake soaked in a mixture of three milks--condensed milk, sweetened evaporated milk, and heavy cream. Now, pan or tray desserts, like brownie fudge or cobbler, in the dining hall creep me out for some reason. Something about it being produced in such a large pan quantity I think. Unfortunately, tres leches was one of these desserts, so it wasn't until junior year that I tried this deliciously moist, creamy, and milky cake. It seemed only fitting to tie off the end of my college career by attempting to recreate something I associate with friendly conversations and meals.

Unfortunately, my baking skills are still not quite up to par. Its a bit embarrassing to think that the dining hall, with its huge bulk quantity cooking and baking, can make something of a superior quality than I can in my tiny kitchen with all the time in the world. While my brother, mother, and father all seemed to enjoy the cake to a certain degree, my sister who has eaten dining hall tres leches could only laugh at my meager attempts. Rather than a ridiculously squishy, gooey, bread-pudding like texture dessert, my tres leches was much drier and dense. Granted, I get the feeling that my sponge cake was not right given its lack of rise. Which was possibly because of over beaten egg whites, too much flour, or too much folding--all of which I have had issues with in the past. I was hoping that the sweet milk mixture would soak the cake enough that these wouldn't be issues, but I tried taste testing the cake after only half a day of soaking rather than overnight as most recipes seem to suggest. The lesson here is that you really should plan your baking more in advance if you're trying to make a 9am EST deadline for a blog post the next day. 

The recipe I used was from All Recipes, but I found that there were a few things that were off. While instructions called to bake for 40-50 minutes, it only took 20-30 mins to finish baking mine. Other weird things I mentioned earlier. I used about a pint of heavy cream to make the whipping cream topping, but that was definitely way too much if you only wanted to cover the cake.

While the dining halls version of tres leches didn't have whipped cream topping or fruit on top like many of the recipes I found online, one can never go wrong with some extra homemade whipped cream and raspberries right? I'm hoping that if I try the cake tomorrow morning, the cake will have had more time to soak so that it'll be more moist. Regardless, I think that tres leches will have to eventually become a perfected recipe in my "repertoire" for any future days of college nostalgia.

Ba Chi Canteen: Pork Belly Canteen Indeed

side note: all store fronts in NOLA are the cutest

As its namesake suggests, Ba Chi Canteen is a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans, LA that specializes in pork belly. Well, that and a whole host of generally delicious asian, fusion-y food. Can you tell that I don't actually know anything about food writing? Self deprecation aside, this was the very first place we went to eat after landing in New Orleans during "Dead Week," aka post-finals, pre-senior week, pre-pre-commencement (cue tears). While others may have sought warm beaches and cheap booze, we flew out in search of good eats, jazz, and swamps for our post-college relaxation break. It would be amusing if I counted the number of times the phrases "hashtag NOLA hashtag notmyrtle" were repeated every time we ate or saw something spectacular.

apologies for the slight blur. sometimes I get too excited about actually consuming food for nonsense like focusing

One of our friends who came with us was in New Orleans the previous summer and is planning on moving back there post-graduation, so she made sure to give us all the deets on the best food places, bars, second-hand stores, and all the other things that revolve around a 20-year-old's life. I'm so glad we had her around or else we probably would have never made it to Ba Chi Canteen, let alone started our trip there with a dish of kimchi fries. To be honest, I still am mildly confused about exactly what kimchi is, though a quick google search would easily remedy that. Regardless, asides from animal style-fries a la In-N-Out, I'm not really a huge fries person (years of conditioning to hate potatoes from the mother). But if you lather then with gooey cheese and savory meats and pickled things, even I'm a convert.

And honestly, just look at these pork belly spring rolls. My NOLA friend really hyped these up for us, and while normally hype just leads to disappointment, these definitely lived up to the hype. Not only are they just really gorgeous and wrapped SO well (in general, translucent things are fascinating), but the rich, warm fat of the pork belly mixed with peanut sauce and crunchy vegetables inside made each bite a perfect mix of flavors and textures.

For our entree at this meal, we all essentially ordered the same thing--a pork/pork belly banh mi. In retrospect, these sandwiches were really too huge and could have easily been shared. I mean just look at that terrible bread:filling ratio. However, French bread rolls are classic it seems when it comes to banh mi slash po boys down South, so maybe I need to expand my tolerance level of different bread:filling ratios (you've already heard me rant about the egg cheese sandwich ratio anyways, so I'll spare the details). Regardless, even with the abnormal bread:filling ratio, the banh mi was really quite divine. When I was young, I was certain that I hated pickled vegetables, but as this sandwich reinforced, pickled vegetables are a great way to reinforce or add flavor it seems. I only managed to get through half of a sandwich, and proceeded to pick out the fillings of the second half, which may have been slightly blasphemous. But if you don't deconstruct your food, or play with it even just a little, are you really eating for yourself? Or just the convention of how your should be eating things?

NOLA: Beignets x 3

Since my last post three weeks ago, I have survived finals, received surprisingly good grades from said finals, and have someone ended up in New Orleans for a "vacation" that continues to be trumped by the difficulty of trying to do things on an iPhone. Such as write this post. Granted the fact I can even do things like write this post is a testament to the versatility that is the modern iPhone. But just because you can, doesn't mean it's comfortable. I mean my poor PhD electrical engineer big wig dad took a year to transition to a iPhone and still hates it.

Anyways, New Orleans. The land of loose vacation morals surrounded by streets lined with churches and anti-abortion buses. It's a very confusing and very sad at the same time. Clearly life moves on as it must, but driving by the Superdome today just made me think about all the death and general lack of humanity that occurred in that building and the neighboring streets and hospital a mere 6ish years ago (I had to edit in that link later because the iPhone app doesn't do text urls, but it's a great article that will make you wrestle with ethical questions that, if you are lucky, will never have to answer in reality).

It was strange to see a place that was filled with so much death rebuilt as a place defining of rowdy sports and aggressive Americanism, and yet what else could better signal the strength of a surviving city? Heck, San Francisco had it's worst earthquake decades ago with plenty of deaths, but it's not like we set aside locations of tragedy as permanent memorials out of both a physical and emotional necessity to move forward and away.

But back to food. This is actually about the world famous Cafe du Monde beignets. Yes those fluffy fried pieces of dough worth more than one trip per vacation, let alone day. There's something to be said about tearing your fingers through a piping hot piece of fried dough and inducing mild burns caked with a thick layer of powdered sugar to boot. Sure it's just another piece of fried dough, but it's a damn delicious piece of dough that does what all fried dough does in all countries--bring people together.

*the fun point of this entire 3x series of beignet photos is that they were all taken on separate trips to Cafe Du Monde.